Not Right
by woodbox
Summary: Circular thinking; things are not as we remember them. A little dismal. Axel/Roxas


**Not Right**

Suburbia, at one in the morning, smells like the cool night and snow dusting shingled roofs and cigarettes .

i.

They were pressed into a corner, packed. Their elbows flattened against the wall and into the creases and Roxas pushed hard. It was hard, now, to tell the memories from the dreams.

Lips were pushed against lips and words were whispered against skin and brick and metal. The night was cold but they were on fire.

_lapsus memoriae_

And then Axel was cold between him and the wall, rigid like a dead man, whispering back but sadly now. "Roxas, what are you doing?"

"I remember this," he said, still struggling with Axel's coat. He couldn't get the zipper down. Axel squeezed his hands, prying them off, shaking his head.

"You can't remember this. We never did this." But I wanted to, he doesn't say, just folds his lips in over his teeth and tries to look stoic and removed from the world. He does not want to indulge this desperation. These furtive looks and scrambling fingers are not Roxas, and if they are, they aren't his Roxas. Which is selfish, but don't think he doesn't know that.

The rush is gone then, for both of them. Roxas catches his breath quietly and looks at the trash on the cement around them. Axel looks at Roxas but says nothing. _I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry_, he thinks desperately. He's finally being the Axel he's supposed to be. It's a sort of ironic justice that this is not his Roxas. He is not his Roxas's Axel, either.

Axel is made of shadows and fire, so morning comes and Roxas goes home by himself and pulls his comforter over his shoulders. He cries.

If it never happened, it should've.

ii.

Back at the castle, Roxas loved to read. Twilight Town has only storybooks.

He used to tell Axel this and that, things he'd read. Axel used to smile and make fun of him. Axel got hit with a lot of books back then.

Sometimes, Axel liked to read. Roxas read old folklore and things with morals and people and sayings, but Axel preferred to make his own meanings. He read most of the reference section at Never Was, and he knew them all but most people didn't care.

One time, he'd found a Latin phrase book and spent the better part of two days sitting around browsing through it. He thought that he would like to learn the language and speak it fluently. The words were sharp and they stood alone. Nothing was extra.

Of the phrases, he liked this one: _memento mori_.

Remember that you will die.

As he died, he did not think on that phrase. He was busy lamenting his death to Sora, making himself useful to the last part of Roxas he would ever see. Before he died, however, he had repeated it to himself.

He could take out a curtain of Heartless, no problem. But Ax, buddy, memento mori. And he had remembered.

iii.

Roxas does not like waiting for night to fall. There's school first, all day, with facts and discussion he's already had with Axel. Who, in his opinion, is far more intelligent than anyone here, even if he had constantly questioned the quality of his neuron activity back when genius was judged in point-difference IQs of 216.0387 and above. They talked about every knowable thing and more about the unknowable ones.

School isn't worse than no school. He has friends, but they are like he was before he remembered the other places. Soft, unnatural, closed. It is sad for him to spend time with them. Hayner asks him, "Are you feeling O.K.?" when he asks a small question.

"What are memories, anyway?"

Pence says something sentimental, and Olette looks thoughtful, like she'll actually try to define it.

iv.

"What are memories, anyway?" he repeats to Axel. He is still sitting on the ugly green couch under the train tracks. Axel is sitting at his side, now. He has a book with him.

"These are," Axel answers.

"These," Roxas echoes. "What are these?"

Axel laughs, then, because with Roxas there is only the illusion of circular conversation. They are actually spiraling upward, higher in knowledge. "Stop asking questions if you know the answer," he advises.

v.

Four hours later and it's almost midnight. Pence has forgotten his textbook and has crept out his back door and down two blocks to retrieve it from under the ugly green couch where he had sat with Roxas that afternoon. Roxas who was behaving strangely.

Roxas who, when he arrived at the Usual Spot, was asleep on the couch. But now there was a man, a red haired man wearing a black coat that made him look dangerous, and he was holding Roxas. He saw Pence.

Pence saw the pleading in his eyes. His math grade could suffer, but this was beyond him. Roxas was small in the man's arms, his mouth open and his face pressed into the chest of the black coat.

vi.

First, Roxas remembered paopu. He remembered the legend as if he'd learned it in a classroom. He remembered telling someone about it, and the person answering as they grinned, "Happily ever after doesn't grow on trees, Roxas."

When he woke up in the morning, there were words on his tongue, weighing it down until he had no thoughts but the memories. He recalled straightening his back, pulling his shoulders strong, and looking over. Someone was always there in the memories.

It made his life now seem lonely.

He remembered things until he had this whole other existence where he fought things and read when he wasn't assigned reading and had someone with him always. He remembered whispers in a foreign language, and teasing and wanting to kill things.

At night, he had dreams that he thought might've been memories. His friend, the one he was always looking over at, was over him, pressing kisses at his cheekbones and along his jaw and at his collarbone, shoulders, stomach.

He didn't get much sleep, sometimes.

vii.

That was around the time that Axel started appearing.

He would skulk out of the shadows when sunset hit the other side of town. He followed Roxas.

"Who are you?" Roxas had demanded.

Axel had looked appropriately doused.

There was one dream that Roxas had a lot. There was a lot of talking in it, but he never remembered what was being said. He remembered only the slight touches he made to the other person. And when he put the pieces together, a month after Axel, he had a whole picture.

It was like jamming a big piece of one puzzle into another one. But, it wasn't in the same amount of space. He was trying to fit a thousand pieces where three had been before.

They had touched before, but it wasn't all of that.

_What wereare you to me?_

Roxas's life seemed to be counting down to something, some big two, one, zero, BANG. Maybe it would be his death, or the clarification of all the _water_ in his head. That was what it felt like. Everything was just sort of soaked, floating around and not making any sense at all. There were the memories and the dreams and the memories that were closer to this life but didn't count for quite as much.

But it is unfinished.


End file.
